----- Forwarded message from Paul Baranowski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -----

From: Paul Baranowski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2004 10:20:53 -0500
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [p2p-hackers] Anti-censorship Proxy Networks (without the HTML this
        time - sorry!)
User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.9 (Windows/20041103)
Reply-To: "Peer-to-peer development." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

First I want to thank everyone for posting such good papers on this 
mailing list - it has given me lots of good reading material!

Now I have a chance to give back to the community...I've been 
researching the problem of web censorship and how to design a system to 
get around it.  Initially I wanted to build a P2P mixnet so that the 
users would also have anonymity.  It turns out that due to various 
attacks that it isnt possible to build a "totally decentralized" P2P 
network - instead it looks more like a star where one server manages 
many proxy nodes.  This is one example where p2p just isnt possible (I 
know, blasphemy on this mailing list!).  Zooko encouraged me to write 
down my findings, and this is what I came up with:

Not Too Few, Not Too Many: Enforcing Minimum Network Knowledge In 
Distributed Systems
http://www.peek-a-booty.org/pbhtml/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=getit&lid=12

Comments are welcome.

Abstract:
Some distributed systems require that each node know as few other nodes 
as possible while still maintaining connectivity to the system. We 
define this state as "minimum network knowledge". In particular, this is 
a requirement for Internet censorship circumvention systems. We describe 
the constraints on such systems: 1) the Sybil attack, 2) the 
man-in-the-middle attack, and 3) the spidering attack. The resulting 
design requirements are thus: 1) An address receiver must discover 
addresses such that the network Node Arrival Rate <= Node Discovery Rate 
<= Node Departure Rate, 2) There must be a single centralized trusted 
address provider, 3) The address provider must uniquely identify address 
receivers, and 4) The discovery mechanism must involve reverse Turing 
tests (A.K.A. CAPTCHAs).

The "minimum network knowledge" requirement also puts limits on the type 
of routing the network can perform. We describe a new attack, called the 
Boomerang attack, where it is possible to discover all the nodes in a 
network if the network uses mixnet routing. Two other well-known attacks 
limit the types of routing mechanisms: the distributed denial-of-service 
attack and the untraceable cracker attack. We describe three routing 
mechanisms that fit within the constraints: single, double, and 
triple-hop routing. Single-hop is a basic proxy setup, double-hop 
routing protects the user's data from snooping proxies, and triple hop 
hides proxy addresses from trusted exit nodes.


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Here is a web page listing P2P Conferences:
http://www.neurogrid.net/twiki/bin/view/Main/PeerToPeerConferences

----- End forwarded message -----
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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a>
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